Home / Franck Biancheri Network / Catherine Bernicchia: “Europe2014-2018” a teaching project of memory to Veterans born with the complicity of Franck Biancheri

Catherine Bernicchia: “Europe2014-2018” a teaching project of memory to Veterans born with the complicity of Franck Biancheri

For more than seven years, Catherine Bernicchia, initiator and coordinator, has been running the project europe20142018. It took flight in these times of Anniversary of the Centenary of the Great War, a time of memory for its soldiers and a time of reflection on the peace, this peace which for us, Europeans, is the evidence of the life of our continent for more than 70 years, the foundation of the 1957 Treaty of Rome, the constitutive act of our community, the European Union.

This project was also born of the moral support that Franck Biancheri had brought to it, an idea that he knew how to awaken and which stayed in Catherine long before germinating.

Franck Biancheri was a great-grandson and grandson of soldiers who died during the first and second world wars. His great grandfather, Augustin Egilde Biancheri, a seaman 2nd class mechanic, disappeared at sea on the night of April 27, 1915, during the torpedoing by the Austrian submarine U5, battleship cruiser Leon Gambetta on which he was engaged. This torpedo, one of the first before that of Luisitania, off Santa Maria di Leuca (southern entrance to the Adriatic) has made 684 victims. (cf: “Il y a 100 ans : dans la nuit du 27 avril 1915, le torpillage du Léon Gambetta fait 684 victimes !” by Benoit Guittet).

Catherine is a painter, she is an artist sensitive to the movements of our time and our memory which is inspired by the spaces and the imprint of the memories carried beyond the century in the memory of those which come after, the young Europeans or the world, custodians, successors, heirs of the past in which unknown ancestors walked. With this project she calls them to remember, to pay tribute to the dead of the Great War, many of whom are their great-grandparents (or even their tri-ancestors), participating in a collective artistic work.

But the project goes much further. Europe 2014-2018 offers them a permanent reflection “out of fashion”, “out of date of birthday”, on the war in general, the war today, their wars of all kinds, “the conflicts inherent to the human nature which occupy simply the everyday; on the external or internal conflict, in the past and now; on the question of the instability of all life, of any state, of any construction; on the question of the counterweight which is always to re-search in itself. ”

The project is based on productions in the form of audiovisual productions and plastic productions grouped together in a “virtual memorial” in the form of a You-Tube channel. Each of us is invited to contribute. On the model of the examples presented each one can make a base of reflection and produce in his way in the respect of the spirit of the project.

“If you paint for Europe, I’m a buyer,” Franck told her.

Catherine goes far beyond, and her project which bears all the tragic and human dimension of yesterday’s Europe, today’s citizen and the seeds of tomorrow’s Europe, deserves all the support we can to bring.